Damn, the author is brave. I think the readers kind of expect Sun Ce to have fallen by now -- as it did in the original novel -- and now he's alive (after so many false deaths -_-), Taiping is crushed (yay! I would have been angry if they won), and the deadly Sun army is attacking Cao Cao in full force. It's going to be really hard to resolve the plot conundrum of having a totally haxx'd up Sun Ce and Cao Cao in all-out fighting and the result still coming out relatively close to history. In reality it really was a lucky break that the already stretched Cao forces got when Sun Ce was assassinated, as they didn't have to deal with a ridiculously aggressive and charismatic warlord striking from the south in the middle of total war with Yuan Shao.

As a side note, I really love Sun Ce's characterization here as someone who's not only god-tier in power, but also disconnected from humanity and morality in a way that could be described either as sociopathic, in our terms, or "god-like," as they would say. But that does make it hard to believe that he wouldn't eventually just cut his way to world domination, or that he can even die in the first place XP.